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jones_supa writes: Russia's legislature, often accused of metaphorically turning back the clock, has decided to do it literally – abandoning the policy of keeping the country on daylight-saving time all year. The 2011 move to impose permanent "summer time" in 2011 was one of the most memorable and least popular initiatives of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency. It forced tens of millions to travel to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter. In the depths of December, the sun doesn't clear the horizon in Moscow until 10am. The State Duma, the lower house of parliament, voted 442-1 on Tuesday to return to standard time this autumn and stay there all year.
The article also discusses a ban on swearing in books, plays, and films that went into effect today in Russia.

They knew that people will be swearing when the new time will become official, as such they made two laws at the same time.
Russians themselves are, actually, unhappy and in their view this is a pure restriction of the free speech.

Just because someone else fixed the library, doesn't mean my servers and embedded devices have the update yet.

Presumably by "the library" you mean "the tzdata files"; this involves no code changes. The whole point of the Olson timezone database and library was to remove any knowledge of specific daylight savings time rules from any code whatsoever, so that changes to the rules could be handled without having to change source code, recompile, and relink every program (this was back in 1987, when shared libraries were still somewhat rare on UN*X systems). Thank you, Clorox and company. [thebokey.com]

But you still have to push the updated data files to the device. With embedded devies that's not necessarily simple.

And even if tzdata is updated, sometimes you need to tell programs to read the updated data, which isn't just a simple restart. One example is MySQL where you have to run mysql_tzinfo_to_sql to load the zoneinfo files into the internal equivalent (it's stored internally in database tables).

Yes, as I said in the post to which you replied:

But there still needs to be an update, and that might require restarting processes that have already loaded the now-out-of-date rule information, so, yeah, it's not as if the timezone cabal can wave their hands and magically update all the systems out there.

And it takes zero effort to get updated tzdata on 'n' different platforms that a company might run? Including outdated ones (sad, but common).

I was involved in the project to manage fan out the last time US changed DST rules a few years back. It's a project.

At the time I would occasionally read the tzdata mailing list. I was amazed at how many countries kept changing the rules willy-nilly. No one in government has any understanding of computer systems. I assume these countries with frequent rule changes get

Time should be recalibrated so that it's all in powers of 2. 64 seconds will be a minute, 64 minutes would be an hour, 32 hours a day, and so on. Readjust how long a second is so that the above adds up to a day.

So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site?

Like, seriously, WTF?!

It's newsworthy because we finally have proof that another countries legislature is at least, just as ridiculous as our own.

Note that the quoted statement can be made in a number of different countries; if you want proof that a lot of countries fuck around with daylight savings time rules, etc., just download the tzdata files and read [iana.org].

Bullshit. Humans have internal timers that are synced to the sun - think about that for a moment. Humans have until recently risen with the sun.But if we do continue with your line of reasoning we should go back to local time, something that most part of the world had until forced to change - often because of the introduction of trains. Now that would be a huge problem for software!

Some things have their own time implementations. Other things are not updated without manual intervention.Personally I see some merit in the Chinese option of having the entire place on Beijing time and adjusting work hours regionally instead - or just doing everything on UTC for the rest of us.

So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site? Like, seriously, WTF?!

It's not, really. I mean, some people here have to deal with maintaining time zone changes on servers and such, so it will be relevant to a few.

But it's mostly to draw out two major types of people who love to debate time issues on Slashdot: (1) people who want to have the perpetual debate about whether Daylight Time EVER makes sense (or whether it ever "saves" anything), and (2) the people who love to propose their favorite "NEW" alternative time and calendar initiatives that are generally very similar

So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site?
Like, seriously, WTF?!

Hi. As the submitter, my reasoning was that timezones are quite nerdy topic. There has also been lots of daylight saving articles in Slashdot over the years. As far as I know, Slashdot hasn't ever been purely tech site.

Aw, scrap that. I actually submitted this only because I can totally annoy you with it, and because of all the possibilities for Soviet Russia jokes.

In my state we had a vote on daylight saving. For was 49%, against was 51% and less than half a percent very faulty (informal) votes or non-attendance and that's with compulsory voting. In all other votes there's more people that turn in blank papers or ballots with things like "none of those bastards" written on them, but on daylight saving people seemed to care more about the issue.

I have heard that those radio-controlled (DCF-77 [wikipedia.org] in Europe) mechanical clocks always do the time adjustment clockwise, so when moving from summer time to winter time, you might hear a "kkkrrrrrrrrrr..." in an unconvenient moment, when the clock patiently goes all 23 hours forward.

Yeah. Indeed all of them go 11 hours, because there was a mistake in my message: I forgot that the face of an analog clock is 12 hours instead of 24. Now, additionally we have to keep in mind that while the clock adjusts the time, the real time goes on forward at the same time, so we actually would have tweak it a bit more than 11 hours if we want to be spot on.

Consider the inherent illogical move of banning words. Everybody has to know the words if you want to ban them. They have to know the banned word in order to not use it, thus someone has to use it, to teach them not to use it !? One assumes Russian will simply use the English words khuy (cock), pizda (cunt), yebat (to fuck) and blyad (whore) instead.

Surely the craziness of teaching people words they are not allowed to use to make sure they can adhere to the law and not use them will dawn on them.

"It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought.... should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. " -- "1984", George Orwell

Russia does not have the luxury of wide open boarders or just accepting a vast culture of drink, lyrics, drugs, health issues, poor quality food and a trade in neon colored laundry liquids.
The Russian idea is to educate as many of its own people to a good average level and then sort out the best for further top quality higher education.
Russia does not have the option to focus on the top 10% of its best people and letting the bottom 90% drop out into slums.
Russia seeks to teach its own people: arts, cultu

Actually those countries doing the best have specific multicultural zones, blending pots where many people of many cultures come together, not necessarily the whole country but at least specific cities (couple of US examples Seattle and San Francisco). If Russia wants to surge ahead, it needs to think outside of the box and promote a multicultural zone, bring in high value immigrants from many regions to conduct high tech activities. A slick move would be to turn the Crimea into a multi-cultural zone and a

Russia does not have the luxury of wide open boarders or just accepting a vast culture of drink... drugs, health issues...

The tragedy of Russia is that Russia is indeed deeply affected by these ills and much of the population is unwilling to face it, preferring instead to complain about other countries. I travel widely in Russia for linguistic/ethnographic fieldwork in Russia, and I am aghast at not just the widespread alcoholism (a perennial ill) but the widespread heroin abuse as well. You have poor village men stealing out of their wives' purses so they can get their next fix. Of course, they can't steal much because there just isn't so much money around, so the quality of the drug is crap, and needle sharing is common, which leads to the spread of HIV.

It is easy for people in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg to pretend that everything is fine and that Russia is somehow avoiding "foreign" problems, but in fact the rest of the country is going to hell and its a damn shame. There's so much potential in Russia and yet the population is doomed by this neglect.

"It forced tens of millions to travel to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter." This is called "living in northern latitudes", people have been doing it for millennia. It also forces millions to "suffer" through really long summer days. Those of us who live in NYC also call it the "running of the boobies' and you can pry it from our cold, dead hands.

What is more concerning is your switch from ranting about day light savings time to an aside about censoring, well, everything.

Shifting time an hour is the act of a mad-man but telling other people what they can say and how they can express themselves is an aside? You should get your priorities in order.

Well, when the days are short, one hour of difference can mean a lot of light and temperature difference. When I was working in Antarctica Dome C, in order to 'simplify' things, 'they' decided we would have the same timezone has the logistical base of operation on the coast which was actually located 5 time zones ahead. So we had to get up when the sun was actually at 3am solar time. In other words the coldest time of day and in summer it was ofter -50C at that time while it could be a balmy -25C at noon even though there was little difference in sun elevation. To make a long story short after a few days we all started to get up at 11am to compensate. The next year they gave us our own proper timezone.

"", people have been doing it for millennia. "are you stupid?1000 year ago people were going to work in the dark? You seriously think that?Tell me, slick, what work were they doing 1000 years ago that required them to do it a specific clock time? 500 years ago? 250 years ago?Going to work is a modern contrivance, going to work at the same specific clock time is a 20th century invention.

The State Duma, the lower house of parliament, voted 442-1 on Tuesday to return to standard time this autumn and stay there all year.

Great move! And I guess that means it will take another three years before it sinks in that DST does still make sense in summer, when instead of being woken up by daylight two or three hours before the workday begins, you can have that extra summer daylight at the end of the day, when you can actually enjoy it in peace.

Not all of us like the sun still being up past 9pm. Some of us hate hearing lawnmowers and having the sun shine in when we're trying to put our kids to bed. Some of us want to look at the stars with our children, but can no longer do it.

If we're basing the clock off the sun, then adjust to local time and leave it alone.If we're not basing the clock off the sun, we all should use UTC.

Anyhow, before condemning their new laws, have a look that what the FCC says.

Obscene Broadcasts Are Prohibited at All Times

Obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution and cannot be broadcast at any time. The Supreme Court has established that, to be obscene, material must meet a three-pronged test:

An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and

The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

So you quote the FCC saying "The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." And Russia specifically bans swearing in works of literary and artistic value. And you can't find the difference?

So from now on they’ll have the luxury of seeing a glimpse of the sun when they drive to work, yet they’ll have to resort to pitch black darkness when they get back. In summer, the sun will rise at 4 in the morning and it will be dark before nine in the evening. It won’t be long till there is a popular backlash against it – people will demand their DST back because they want their beauty sleep unimpeded by the overly early sunrise, and they want their evenings to be light longer.

That's the great idea about that russion system. 3 years of all-year-round DST/summer time, then all back to Standard/Winter-Time, and in a few years, they'll be going for a few years of summer time again. Like Westeros.

Summary ommits that during soviet times, russian time was also DST all year round, so this is not a new idea from 2011. That was just the latest iteration.

But don't you think the ban on writing it down will strengthen the oral tradition that got those phrases into the language in the first place? It was probably all this unfettered desktop publishing that kept the phrase for "strike on the cunt with an 89mm floppy" out of the language until it was too late for it to have meaning. Now it's just pointless, and soon it will pass out of mind, like data stored on an 89mm floppy.

My car's clock live on UTC, mostly because I'm too lazy to adjust it. The problem is that when it's serviced the mechanic "helpfully" adjusts the time, which caused a fair amount of confusion the first time. Same goes for the clock in my flat - fortunately it doesn't get messed around by my garage.

Funny you mention tides and ambiguity - what really winds me up is when things like tide tables are published with no mention of a time zone, Pop quiz hot shot, you draw 2.2m, do you assume you're at HW+3, or HW+4

The problem is that tide tables in the UK are [as a rule] published with times explicitly in UTC. However, tides are occasionally published on the sailing instructions (regatta race information) without any mention of timezone, so do you assume that they're using local time (most likely), or UTC. It's easy to check, but it annoys me when it's done by a big event organiser such as Cowes Week - three letters are all you need to make everything completely unambiguous.